The starting point of any inquiry into the relationship between Frederick and the Arabic-Islamic culture goes back to the Arabic-Norman Sicily to which he was bound by the great Constance, by his infancy, by his early adolescence, and by his crown. Despite the fact that he was born by chance in the Marche region and had preferred to spend his adult years in the flat land of Puglia, where he died, it was in Sicily that he first formed the elements of his intellectual personality and culture. The first question to be answered, therefore, is: How much of the Arabian culture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was still alive in Sicily after the survival of both the Moslem domination and the political, religious, ethnical, and social crises by which the last Mohammedan influence upon Sicily had been completely eliminated under the last Norman kings?